The web has changed so much since I threw up my first page in November, 1994. Without the mega search engines, being able to navigate the web was a challenge. (Do they still do the Internet Hunt's?) It was sort of like being a navigator in the days of the tall ships, where charts and locations were traded as valuable information amongst those in the trade. Those charts were our home pages, just barely more than bookmark files, but carefully charting out which archies, gophers and fingers could give you the information you wanted.
But now the search engines cover everywhere like the satellites in the GPS web. We don't need the landmarks and plots to find a location. We don't need each others lists of finds anymore than we need a compass and an astrolabe.
Now the value of a home page is its original content -- pieces of information that are not available elsewhere on the web. Repeating stuff found elswhere is just cluttering the indexes, making everything harder to find.
Our web pages will make a statement about ourselves and give everyone a glimpse to at who we really are. We can make them dig through the fluff and the clutter, or we can trim it back to the real content.
You are now probably thinking, "So just what original content have you put on the web, Mr. Content Purity Boy."
My answer is simple, "Not much."
However, I do have some. Enough people had asked me for recipes that it made sense to put a handful on the web. And I got tired of not being able to find information on wine grapes other than the big four, so I compiled informtion on several grape varieties. Also, I needed to document SQL tricks for myself, and having it on the web was the most convenient place. The oddest is that code I wrote for automated judging of Diplomacy games back in 1985 resurfaced and is being use in a system called DGMS.
I keep starting trip reports for our various vacations and scuba adventures. Sometimes I get them pretty much finished, and other times they sort of trail off into rough notes. When Deanne picked up an interest in UW photography the amount of images took a huge upswing.
Sometime around 1981 most of my family and some friends went for little day float on the Illinois River. Some how that turned into an annual event and grew well beyond the family. Lynn started producing tee-shirts every year and producing flyers and order forms to mail out. The mailing got time consuming and along came the web. The first web site went up in 1998 when I ripped the logo that he sent me for comments. I think Lynn was surprised when I replied back with a working site. It was primitive, but I had his attention. In 1999 he produced several iconic images, and by 2000 he was a full participant and the design made a real generational leap. In 2001 he shanghied some other designers but the flash based product was late so I created a static site to get the info online in time for a shirt the shirt order. In 2002 all the designers were busy leaving me to my own devices. 2003 was even odder as Lynn produced no shirt or logo. So I tossed up some spoofs from the war in Iraq. The current page will always be at www.eskridgefloat.com. We also continue to add pirate shirt photos to immortalize the 1994 pirate shirt .
My life took quite a change in early 2005 with a cereberal hemmorage which later was diagnosed to have been a complication of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) a particularly nasty form of brain cancer. I've been documenting some of that in my journal. It doesn't have the polish of Ivan Noble's journal of his experiences with GBM, but then I'm not a science writer for the BBC. There's other miscellaneous stuff there but the cancer discussion starts here.